Concepts and Plural Predication: The Effects of Conceptual Knowledge on the Interpretation of Reciprocal and Conjunctive Plural Constructions

Abstract

This dissertation studies the interpretation of plural sentences and its connection to conceptual information in the human mind. The main claim is that conceptual information on content words can affect the logical interpretation of complex plural sentences, unlike what traditional formal semantic studies of sentence meaning would expect. It is argued that this interaction is governed by a new principle, the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis, which is developed using insights on concepts from cognitive psychology. Two types of plural sentences are studied experimentally: reciprocal sentences (as in (1) and (2)) and sentences with predicate conjunction (as in (3) and (4)). A series of experiments - both behavioral and neurolinguistic - demonstrate that the interpretations of these constructions vary systematically between speakers and between situations, despite the fact that they differ only with respect to content words (like pinch vs. know, and cook vs. read). For example, sentence (3) is often considered ‘true’ in a situation with four men in which two of the men are sitting and the other two men are cooking, while sentence (4) is much less often considered ‘true’ in the logically equivalent situation in which only two men are sitting and the other two men are reading. 1. John, Bill and George are pinching each other 2.John, Bill and George know each other 3.The men are sitting and cooking 4.The men are sitting and reading The main theoretical question throughout the work is what mechanism accounts for the interaction between logical sentence interpretation and non-logical meanings of content words. The Maximal Typicality Hypothesis (MTH) is introduced, which is described as a mechanism which works in plural reciprocal and conjunctive sentences. It uses conceptual information on content words to determine how acceptable a plural sentence will be in a given situation. The conceptual information that the MTH has recourse to pertains to speakers’ perceived typicality of different situations for the concepts that content words refer to. On the basis of that information, the MTH singles out one situation as the core situation that is described by a sentence. The core situation is an optimal ‘compromise’: the situation that is maximal for the sentence among the situations that are most typical for the concept(s) within it. The MTH is used for explaining the acceptability of plural sentences in different situations. Firstly, plural sentences are expected to be highly acceptable in their core situation as well as in situations that properly contain the core situation (in so far as the latter are possible). Secondly, plural sentences are expected to be less acceptable in situations that are properly contained in the core situation. These predictions of the MTH are confirmed experimentally by first measuring what is perceived as typical for a given concept in order to predict the core situation of a sentence, and then approximating sentence acceptability in different situations. This marks a substantial advance in the analysis of plurals, and starts to bridge the gap between semantic theories of language and cognitive theories of concepts.